SECONDS OF PLEASURE

The dark prince of the American stage and indie cinema debuts with 20 baleful vignettes.

Only LaBute would call these “seconds of pleasure,” even ironically. Inches beneath the rambling bonhomie in the monologues and dialogues is the unflinching brutality of their casual betrayals and taboo-busting. “Anyway, it was good to see him again. Really, it was,” concludes a young woman after luring the father who abandoned her family into a motel room and seducing him. When he’s in a sunny mood, LaBute gives the patron whose car battery has run down outside a strip club a helping hand (“Open All Night”). When he’s coasting in neutral, he remakes fables like Hawthorne’s story “The Birthmark” (“Perfect,” in which a wife’s tiny imperfection drives her husband crazy) or Eric Rohmer’s film Claire’s Knee (“Boo-Boo,” whose narrator can’t rest till he’s touched the scab on the heroine’s leg). More often, he’s thought of his own fiendish ways to unmask his characters’ slimy pretensions as they humiliate each other. A college student sweats to break up with his girlfriend on a tight deadline (“Spring Break”). A traveler flirts with a stranger in an airport knowing he’s going to have to ditch her within minutes (“Layover”). A flight attendant spots her current lover’s wife on a transatlantic flight (“Whitecap”). An amateur filmmaker recalls the first time he and a buddy screen-tested a prostitute for a special video (“Ravishing”). LaBute’s whiplash command of the ironic distance between his heroes’ self-excusing blather (only a Hollywood actor’s uncomfortable reunion with the “girl-slash-woman” he’d bedded and forgotten strikes a false note) is so uncanny that every story stings.

There’s precious little moral sense ballasting the unrelenting cruelty. Only a sadist, or a masochist, would read this poisoned volume through at a sitting. But, as LaBute might say, doesn’t that include us all?